The art of getting leaders to trust your social ideas

9 June

You’ve carefully planned a social campaign, mapping out how you’re going to approach your next batch of content in line with everything you know about the social world and your strategy, and someone senior pops up with, “We really need to show the product in every post” or “Maybe a graphic to say it’s available at Ocado?” I forgive you for the internal eye roll.

It’s easy to assume senior leaders understand social media as intuitively as we do, but realistically the majority don’t. Their worlds are tangible business goals and clear results, not Reels and trending audios.

My unpopular opinion is that if your senior leadership doesn’t grasp why social matters, it’s probably on you. It’s your responsibility to bridge the gap, demonstrating clearly how social supports the business goals they care about. Securing buy-in means proving, convincingly, that you’re the expert they can trust.

So how do you translate your social media strategy into language senior leadership can get behind? Here’s what I’ve learned about getting it right… no eye rolls required.

You're likely facing these challenges:

To be successful in most businesses, regardless of role, you need to be able to confidently drive understanding upwards, translating what you intuitively know into what senior leaders tangibly understand. There are three common challenges I think you'll recognise:

Limited airtime: often we only get a brief window in meetings with senior stakeholders. Without careful planning, these discussions quickly become reactive ("Can you make this go viral?") rather than strategic. Go prepared with clear, concise updates directly linking your efforts to their business goals.

Actionable step: Create a simple reporting dashboard (one page is ideal) clearly showing your social progress against agreed business objectives.

You speak different languages: chances are you’re spending hours each week immersed in discussions about engagement, community-building, trends, and algorithm shifts (you’re reading this, after all). The senior leadership whose buy-in you’re after, however, are not. They’re managing wider business plans, marketing funnels and commercial targets. More often than not, social sits as a small slice of their marketing pie - it’s visible but vaguely understood. Your role is not only to share performance, but to frame social clearly in terms of outcomes senior leaders understand and prioritise.

By clearly marrying social performance up to their priority metrics, you'll begin to bridge this communication gap effectively. Stick with me: I’ll outline my approach to aligning social goals in our next section.

Requests from nowhere can completely take you off-course: I’ve been there: Questions come without context, and you leave interactions tasked with something completely left-field, disconnected from your original roadmap. Suddenly you're investing significant time on a content approach you don’t believe is right, because the Head of Marketing casually threw a new idea into the ring with little depth or clarity about how it ties back to what you're actually working towards.

This isn't just frustrating; ultimately, it wastes valuable time and resources. It's your job to strategically lead and contain the conversation in these moments. Even if you're more junior, senior stakeholders look to you because they understand this is your world. Pushing back politely and clearly shows genuine strategic understanding and expertise.

Actionable step: In response to off-plan suggestions, have ready-made phrases like:

"That's a good idea; before I pivot I want to take some time to see if it fits within our current strategy"
"I can look at how this compares to our current strategy and decide if pivoting makes sense."
"Based on our goal of increasing repeat customers, here's what I'd suggest instead…"

The key to success is aligning your goals.

The most important thing I've learnt about getting senior buy-in is that leadership needs clarity, not detail. They need to quickly grasp how social media activity directly supports their business objectives

To achieve this, I use something called The Cascade Approach.

At its simplest, the Cascade Approach starts from the top with your overarching business goal, then moves down into linked social media objectives, and then down again into individual platform strategies and then clear KPIs. Here's how it works in practice:

Step 1: Ask senior leadership about their priorities.

Be ready for the inevitable “increase revenue” - a valid goal but too broad to direct your social approach effectively. Dig deeper by asking targeted questions. For example, right now, does increasing revenue specifically mean:

Acquiring new customers?
Increasing repeat purchases?
Growing memberships?
Boosting average order value?
Reaching more new customers?

Each goal demands a different social strategy, influencing your content, messaging and platform choices.

Watch out: You might need to gently challenge leadership. For example, if you're being asked to deliver direct revenue through organic channels, you could clarify that organic social tends to excel at awareness, community building, or initial interest rather than direct conversion. Helping senior leadership see clearly what social realistically delivers helps set clearer mutual expectations.

Step 2: Map out your social goals.

Once the business goal is clear, define precisely how social media will support it. Perhaps social is your channel for reaching and attracting new audiences, nurturing existing customers, or fostering an engaged community around your brand. Each of these social objectives plays a distinctive role in delivering long-term success aligned to the wider business picture.

Step 3: Drill down to platform-specific goals and clear KPIs

Now translate your overall social goal into objectives tailored specifically to the platforms you're focusing on. Instagram might be ideal for community-building and fostering loyalty, whereas TikTok could be best positioned for increasing brand awareness and reaching new users. Set clear, measurable KPIs to hold yourself accountable against each platform objective, making your strategy tangible and trackable over time.

Getting upfront buy-in on this cascade is crucial—it becomes a strategic tool for navigating those inevitable curveball moments. Instead of being pulled off course by ad-hoc senior suggestions, you can calmly steer conversations back to agreed priorities: "We agreed this channel would focus on X goal, and this idea doesn't quite fit with that."

Regularly revisit your Cascade, too. If you sense friction, or feel your senior team’s priorities have shifted, use it proactively to check in.

Practical tips and takeaways:

When you’re next preparing to get leadership buy-in - whether it’s a monthly update or presenting a major new plan, keep these actionable pointers front-of-mind:

Check-ins must be purposeful and concise: protect the time you have by keeping reports and updates short, clear and strategically aligned. Create a simple reporting dashboard that explicitly connects your activities to your leadership-approved goals.

Speak their language, not yours: avoid deep dives into engagement metrics or trending audio specifics. Instead, demonstrate clearly how these directly support key business priorities like customer acquisition or growing memberships.

Enter meetings prepared for curveballs: practise clear, polite ways to handle them, like: “Given we’re prioritising new customer awareness, here’s what I'd recommend instead…”

Get early (and regular) senior alignment: bring senior leadership on the journey early and proactively, and refer back to your Cascade approach in monthly meetings or as preamble to your performance reports.

Senior leadership buy-in isn’t about proving that you’re right or they’re wrong. It’s an ongoing conversation built around clear priorities, mutual understanding and proactive alignment. With the Cascade Approach, clarity about objectives and some strategic confidence, you're well-equipped to confidently bridge the gap.

I’ll leave you with this:

What’s one important conversation with senior leaders that you’ve been avoiding, and how can clarity around business goals help you to finally approach it?

As always, I’d love to hear what you think! Find me on LinkedIn here, and let’s chat!